According to the IPSOS “Issues Index” 51% of people name “immigration” as the most important issue facing Britain today. Its rise up the index has no doubt been fuelled by the visibility of unauthorised entries by hazardous routes, but the concerns being expressed cover a much wider field: fears about population growth, about public services, about housing, about jobs and wages, and about crime, all get pulled into the mix. In this long read we try to examine these issues, and we argue that there are far more important matters we should be concentrating on.
Worry about population growth has a long history. Paul Slack writes of how, in early C17th England, (when the population was about 8 million) issues such as people leaving the countryside (and heading for London) as a knock-on effect from early enclosures and agricultural reforms, and a sense that the population overall was growing, led thinkers to believe that a population could become “too large”: “As Bacon and others appreciated in 1607………popular disorder and unemployment followed if ‘the population of a kingdom’ exceeded ‘the stock of the kingdom which should maintain them’.” (“The Invention of Improvement” p78).
The question prompted responses remarkably similar to what we hear today. On the one side, those who held a somewhat static view felt that the country had a natural capacity and needed to vent some of its population into the new colonial enterprises. Others, though, already held a more dynamic position – believing that a growing population might enable growing prosperity. The late C17th political economist William Petty compared his understanding with that of his contemporary, John Graunt, who had made one of the earliest attempts to estimate the national population. Petty characterised Graunt as thinking that there was only ‘a certain proportion of work to be done‘ in England, and only ‘a certain proportion of trade in the world‘. He, however, held it to be ‘a false opinion that our country is fully peopled‘, and he contended that if the land was ‘improved to the utmost of known husbandry’ many more hands could be employed in producing ‘exquisite manufactures and the extraordinary productions of art’ for export. England might even support ‘a city like London planted in every twenty miles square thereof’.
With the benefit of knowing the outcome, it is easy to see Petty as the man vindicated by experience, just as the most well-known later population doomster, Malthus, has had to endure being paraded before generations of school-students as an example of the unsustainability of a static view of the relationship between people and resources.
Economic development is invariably many sided, and it would be too simple to claim that population growth always solves its own problems or, conversely, that a shrinking or restricted population will always lead to detriment. Heady & Hodge, “The Effect of Population Growth on Economic Growth”, pointed out that “the estimated effects of population growth measures on economic growth are not robust, varying between being positive, negative, and insignificantly different from zero”.
Arguably, there are situations where population growth does clash with available resource in a negative way. Since the mid-20th century, sub-Saharan Africa has gone through a period of unprecedented population growth, at the same time as it has been hit by challenges associated with global warming, leading to increasing levels of human population displacement.
In most cases, though, the thing about population growth is probably that it depends what you do with it. In their review of work on the subject, “The Role of Population in Economic Growth”, Peterson et al (2017) conclude: “Most of the work reviewed in this article supports the idea that population growth is an important factor in overall economic growth and may even contribute to increased growth in per capita output in some cases”.
The “we are full” complaint does not make much sense, because there are so many things for population growth to interact with. It may be difficult to say which is the chicken and which the egg, but there is nothing to say that population growth generally prohibits economic growth – and population outflows tend to happen where an economy goes into decline.
An article titled “The Correlation Between Population and Economic Growth” on the Andaman Partners website says:
“Population growth data from 2014 to 2023 reveal a striking correlation with economic growth:
- The 93 economies with population growth above the global average of 1%, mainly developing and emerging countries, had an average real economic growth rate of 3.1%.
- The 53 economies with population growth between 0% and 1% had an average economic growth rate of 2.3%.
- The 28 economies with negative population growth, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe, had an average real economic growth rate of 1.4%”.
Looking at Britain, the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI) found, in “The relationship between economic growth and population growth”, that: “In general, high population growth in the mid-to-late 1960s was matched by high economic growth, and lower population growth in the 1970s was matched by lower economic growth. Similarly, higher population growth from the mid-1980s onwards was matched by relatively high economic growth (with the exception of the early 1990s recession). However, the relationship between economic growth and population growth appears to have broken down, or loosened, from the early 2000s onwards. The population has continued to grow at an extremely fast rate, while the economy has experienced a severe recession and stagnation, before beginning to recover in 2013”.
In the 60 years after 1870, Argentina’s population increased six-fold, some 7m immigrants entering a country whose population had been only 2m. By 1910, the country because the seventh richest in the world, with a per capita income higher than Spain and Italy. Then, when there was an economic downturn in the 1930s, generally attributed to political instability, emigration took over from immigration as a feature.
Dynamic economies have more than once shown themselves capable of absorbing significant population inflows. In 1962, for instance, when Algeria became independent, about 900,000 persons of European origin “repatriated” to France. There were some impacts on unemployment a wages, but they were relatively small and short-lived. When the Soviet Union lifted emigration restraints in 1989, some 800,000 Jews moved to Israel in a five-year period, increasing the working population some 12%. You might say the Israeli economy benefited from its relations with the USA and Britain, but this immigration is also often cited as a “boost” factor at a time when the country was also privatising state-owned corporations and deregulating financial and capital markets.
A more recent variation of the “full” argument has focussed on the issue of GDP per capita. Yes, it says, GDP may grow as population grows – but our GDP per capita is falling. The point is important, because it draws our attention to the fact that a further complication in the relationship between population size and the economy is the spread of a population across age groups. An American economist, Robert Gordon, in “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, has argued that a feature affecting GDP per capita is the lowering of “working hours per capita” – itself a consequence of the convergence of declining fertility rates with people living longer lives, and the shift in the ratio of working to retired people.
What has been cited as a drawback from immigration in fact turns out to be an argument for it. An IMF “Discussion Note” “Gone with the Headwinds” argued that a one percent increase in the share of migrants in an adult population raised labour productivity in the economy by up to three percent.
One complication is that it remains possible for a growing population to be of overall benefit whilst at the same time creating local frictions or problems of adjustment. Negative effects that have a localised direct impact – in the case of immigration, say, a bulge of non-English-speaking kids in a school – can attract more attention than positive spin-offs that are more widely dispersed. Or, as Neeraj Kaushal put it in her book “Blaming Immigrants”, “an immigrant will compete with local workers who are engaged in the same occupation. But she will also compliment local skills in certain other occupations”.
As with many things, there is no absolute consensus on immigration’s effects on labor markets. In 2017, though, the House of Commons “Home Affairs Committee” received evidence from the London School of Economics “Centre for Economic Performance” that was suitably undramatc: “we can confidently say that the empirical evidence shows that neither immigrationas a whole or EU immigration has had significantly large negative effects on averageemployment, wages, inequality or public services for the UK-born population. Nor, it shouldbe said, are there large positive effects”.
Concern about population growth through immigration often expresses itself as concern about the impact on specific areas of our social life, such as the availability of public housing or the Government’s fiscal position. For our part, though, we find that when we come to assess these issues we find convincing reasons for the position in which we find ourselves without even having to mention immigrants. Take the case of housing, for instance. When we considered the impact of the “Right to Buy” in January this year – Trades Council says abolish “right to buy” and increase public housing stock. – Blackburn and District Trades Union Council – we were able to point to why it is has become too difficult for people to get housing for social rent strictly by looking at the impact of policy decisions over the previous 40 years. We are not alone in thinking this: Election 2024: migrants aren’t to blame for Britain’s housing crisis.
Areas such as the balance between government spending and income are subject to so many variables that it is difficult to isolate just one element. Where attempts have been made to do this in respect of immigration, though, the results suggest that any impact tends to be marginal either way. In their 2014 “Economic Journal” study, “The Fiscal Effects of Immigration in the UK”, Christian Dustmann and Tommaso Frattini found: “when considering the resident immigrant population in each year from 1995 to 2011, immigrants from the European Economic Area (EEA) have made a positive fiscal contribution, even during periods when the UK was running budget deficits, while Non-EEA immigrants, not dissimilar to natives, have made a negative contribution. For immigrants that arrived since 2000, contributions have been positive throughout..”.
Liebeg and Mo, in an International Migration Outlook study in 2013 on “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration in OECD Countries” found that impacts were on the whole modest, whether positive or negative.
In March this year “The Economist” reported: “Britain’s Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)…….found that a representative high-wage migrant worker would be a net fiscal contributor over their lifetime even if they claimed a pension and used the health service until the age of 100. A low-wage migrant would, by the same age, have cost over £1.5m, at assumed 2028-29 prices, having been a fiscal drain since their arrival“, but qualified this by saying: “Yet the studies are incomplete. Take the OBR’s analysis. Its representative low-skilled migrant is assumed to stay at the same low point in the earnings distribution from the year they arrive; in reality, migrants tend to close the pay gap with natives over time. And the estimates exclude the beneficial effects of having more workers for the public sector. Without migration, the state would have to raise pay to attract, say, care workers—and probably for all workers, not just new ones”.
We have serious, genuine, problems in this country. None of them has immigration as the root cause, whilst, without immigration, some of our key public services would recently have been in danger (Migration and the health and care workforce – Migration Observatory – The Migration Observatory). We bet, in fact, that even if you were to surround the country with a ring of fire, so that not even a bird could fly across, none of our problems would be solved in five or ten years. More likley, they would get worse. Not catastrophically so, but measurably. Neeraj Kaushal comments about Japan, possibly the industrial nation most reluctant to accept immigrants: “Japan’s working-age population has fallen by ten million over the past two decades and is projected to fall further by another eleven million in the next two…….indicating that Japan will remain in the economic eclipse it has been trapped in for a quarter century”. It is projected that Japan’s “dependency ratio” – the number of dependents per one hundred working-age persons – will rise to 96 by 2050.
On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean there are politicians who express anxiety about immigration by suggesting that immigrants import crime, alongside themselves. It is an area of particularly heated debate, with accusations of hyperbole on the one hand, and of favouritism and denial on the other.
As conservative commentator Fraser Nelson has noted, however, the high level position for Britain in recent years has been that the trends for crime and immigration simply don’t correlate:
It could, of course, at a stretch, be the case that “immigrant crime” was rising as “overall crime” fell. Conservative MP Robert Jenrick, for instance, recently said on Radio 4’s Today programme that 40% of sexual crimes in London last year were committed by foreign nationals. The claim was based on figures from the Metropolitan Police on who had been proceeded against – ie. brought before a court – for sexual offences by nationality. This, however does not mean they had been found guilty of committing any offence. For example, there were 14,242 defendants brought to court for sexual offences at magistrates courts in England and Wales in 2024, but 8,098 convictions, according to Ministry of Justice statistics (“The Guardian” 05.08.25).
There is, arguably, a lack of recent research. But this is possibly because studies done earlier in the century, both in the UK and in other countries, tended to show there was no particularly strong correlation between immigration and crime.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/2193-9039-2-19#citeas (2013) found no evidence of causal link between immigration and criminal behaviour, whilst Ignatans, Dainis and Matthews, Roger (2017) “Immigration and the Crime Drop: International Perspectives”, European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 25 (3), suggested there could be a link between falling crime rates and waves of immigration.
The 2018 Final report of the Migration Advisory Committee “EEA migration in the UK” found no evidence that migration had an effect on crime rates in England and Wales.
“Full Fact” quoted the “Migration Observatory” as saying the following:
“While we cannot know precisely what share of people from different countries are incarcerated, it is clear that the numbers do vary considerably by nationality. A key reason for this is likely to be differences in socio-economic status among people arriving on different immigration routes.
“For example, people from comfortable backgrounds with high levels of education and professional jobs are much less likely to go to prison, and this is likely to be true among migrants too (such as those arriving on work visas for skilled jobs). Age and sex also play a role: young men have higher offending rates.
“As a result, it would not be surprising if people arriving in the UK through different routes (eg. on work visas versus small boats) had different offending rates, though the data are currently not good enough to understand these trends properly.”
That seems more balanced and judicious than extrapolations based on isolated cases, aggravating though these may be.
Unauthorised entry clearly excites considerable concern, and it is not difficult to see why. British law makes undocumented entry a criminal offense, and so unauthorised entrants can instantly be branded as “illegal” – not very good PR. What seems to be the most accessible authorised route manages to be both highly visible and furtive at the same time. People who have been living rough over the course of their journey tend to end up looking a bit mean and desperate. IPSOS say that despite the evidence of “succesful” asylum applications, 62% of Britons believe asylum seekers are economic migrants falsely claiming refugee status to take advantage of welfare services.
Apurav Bhatiya and Shanta Kadam, in “Small Boats, Big Impact”, found that “small boat arrivals are associated with a significant decline in public support for immigration. This decline in support extends beyond irregular migration…”.
You have to ask, though, if the whole issue of unauthorised entry hasn’t been blown out of all proportion. Surveys suggest that the British public overestimates how much immigration is “illegal”. According to “You Gov”, almost half of Britons incorrectly (47%) think there are more migrants staying in the UK illegally rather than legally, including fully a third of the public (32%) who think the illegal figure is “much higher”. If people believe, on top of this, that immigration in general is “a problem”, then it is no wonder they are so ill disposed towards those they see as creating this problem without even having permission to be in the country.
But the considerations we have outlined above suggest that the grounds for thinking of immigration as “a problem” are flimsy – and unauthorised entrants are anyway but a fraction of the numbers. The 2021/2022 census data put the entire foreign-born population of the UK at 10.7 million. It is hard to know the number of unauthorised residents. In 2017 the Greater London Authority estimated 674,000, going up to 809,000 when including UK-born children. A Pew Research study from about the same time originally suggested a range of 800,000 to 1.2 million, but this was retracted in March 2025 and revised down to 700,000 to 900,000.
Unauthorised entry clearly overlaps with the responsibilities we have accepted as a part of international arrangements. We now hear of people criticising these arrangements because they go, in part, back to the 1950s. We ought to remember that people back then had perhaps a sharper appreciation of the consequences of world disorder. Our country still has a privileged position within the United Nations and we should live up to the challenge that entails. There can be a cost to doing the right thing, but the final balance sheet is one of trying to secure basic standards for everyone – with the hope that we ourselves will never need the protection of these.
Our rule is “do as you would be done by” – and one thing that means is not deciding what should happen to people who come here by unauthorised means without listening to what they have to say for themselves.
The UK’s intake of asylum seekers is not disproportionately high compared to many other European nations. In the year ending June 2024, the UK ranked fifth in Europe for total asylum applications received, representing 8% of total applications across the EU+ and UK. When considering the number of asylum seekers relative to population size, the UK ranked 19th.
The strength of public feeling on the issue of immigration was revealed in a recent “You Gov” article (“Is there public support for large-scale removals of migrants?”), which said almost half of Britons (45%) say they would support “admitting no more new migrants, and requiring large numbers of migrants who came to the UK in recent years to leave”. 24% of deportation supporters said they wanted to see large-scale removals even of asylum seekers who have since been granted British citizenship.
A 2025 IPSOS Report, “Public Hostility Towards Immigration”, found that 67% of Britons believe immigration is too high (yet, when it comes to specific groups, only 14% want fewer immigrant doctors or nurses, and 19% fewer seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers).
The IPSOS study comments: “Negative preconceptions about immigrants or refugees may seem –even to the people holding these views – to justify hostility, but they might simply be expressions of it. Therefore, disproving specific concerns, like the impact on housing, may not reduce hostility and could even backfire by reinforcing perceptions of censorship and validating existing attitudes”.
Immigration can become a powerful political issue because anti-immigration sentiment seems to tap into what may be an ingrained human trait. Insofar as we can speak of any characteristic being “hard-wired” in an animal that has flourished on account of its adaptability, a propensity to identify with groups wider than kin features predominantly throughout our development. In one study involving children, the subjects were randomly assigned one of two differently coloured T-shirts – and then began to show signs of favouring those with the same attire. Group identification has been fundamental to our identity as social beings. But, especially when reinforced by visible signs of appearance and self-decoration (and also by speech even at the level of accent), it can be associated with emotions of distrust and otherness. Threat centres in the brain light up on perceiving an out-group member, while neurotransmitters like oxytocin seem to facilitate both in-group bonding and out-group exclusion (see: Look Twice | Greater Good).
Not everyone buys into this idea. But even critics of it find themselves looking for other ways to explain strong and reactive group identification: Racism isn’t innate – here are five psychological stages that may lead to it.
In Britain, we also see a degree of hostility, or distrust, towards Muslims, on the part of a minority. In 2024, “More In Common” said “we identify 21 per cent of the public admit to holding very or somewhat negative views of Muslims. While it is revealing that such a large number express these views in a survey, the true extent could be larger, because some will be inclined to answer this sort of survey question in a socially desirable way”:
In the same year “Hope Not Hate” commented “the extent of anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain remains stark. Our polling since 2018 has consistently found a third of the population maintain negative attitudes towards Muslims”.
Unfortunately, understanding the contribution of these forces does not necessarily point the way to a solution. Calling out policies or candidate statements as racist, including in respect to immigration policies, seems to have little effect (eg. Zhirkov, Kirill, and Eugenia Quintanilla. 2024. “This Proposal Is Racist: The (Muted) Consequences of Invoking Racism in Policy Arguments.” Politics, Groups, and Identities), and it is possible that people who have turned in numbers towards far-right parties have done so, in part, because they regard accusations of racism simply as name-calling designed to shut them up.
Our history, nevertheless, is one of continually re-imagining solidarity so that it helps bind, rather than break apart, coalitions and allegiances much greater than our original small bands of families wandering around Africa. “Hope Not Hate” says: “Crucially, there is an appetite for work to strengthen social connection within communities. Despite bleak perceptions of cohesion nationally, the story at the local level is far more optimistic. A large majority of Britons (73%) say they enjoy mixing with people of other religions, ethnicities and backgrounds, 63% think their local community is peaceful and friendly, and 41% want to get to know their neighbours better”.
What irritates most about anti-immigration movements is the extent to which they deflect attention away from efforts to find and promote real solutions. By barking up the wrong tree they mean we get deflected from looking at key problems straight in the face: the cost of living, our public services, housing, social care, precarious work, poverty and inequality – these are the matters that should be foremost in our attention. Compared to them, immigration is, frankly, something not worth getting too hot under the collar about, and certainly not something it is at all useful to talk about in “good or bad” terms.
However, in a world where every country appears now to have some form of border regulation, the Labour Movement can’t expect to get away without having any policy at all on the matter, much as we would like to think that it is no business of ours where other people choose to live and work. Pragmatically, we are not going to transform a country so anxious about immigration without offering a context of how we would like to see things handled. No policy is ever going to control everything in fine detail – situations we did not predict, like Ukraine and Hong Kong, have fuelled the vast majority of the recent increase in migration into the UK. But possibly an idea like that put forward by the Institute for Government, Why government should introduce an annual Migration Plan | Institute for Government, does offer a framework for developing a realistic policy.